Originally posted by Lanny
There you say (paraphrasing, obviously) that the fact that we communicate (physical action) about experience suggests experience is the cause of that communication. It's an interesting objection but ultimately one I don't think succeeds, I think we can communicate about a thing without that thing being a causal influence on communication.
How do you know what a "James Bond" or a "cufflink" is?
No we cannot communicate about a thing without that thing being the causal influence.
The only arguments you have made so far are basically that we can abstract away the causal influences because they are really complex.
The formation of you as an individual happened in a wild milieu of selective processes applied to billions of years of chemistry that happened to chance upon outsized relative fitness advantages from cooperation, formed languages, and became a complex system of organisms with a cultural dimension that allowed for ideas like spies and fictional characters and shirts, with cuffs that don't have buttons but instead a space for an accessory designed to hold them together.
There is no man named James Bond and his cufflinks are not physical objects within the world. But ideas don't just spring from the ether as some separate domain of existence. It's a complex bundle of influences that you call James Bond, and that's what is having the causal effect.
The physical roots of our mental lives are complex and there's no denying that they are complex as fuck. Maybe even intractably complex for our species, or any species, or any structure of any complexity aside from the universe itself to comprehend on a physical level. Probably nobody will ever be able go write out some equations of motion for your consciousness.
But that doesn't mean it's not physically caused.
What about me talking about something makes that thing necessarily physical? Why can't I simply be talking about a non-physical experience that has no causal influence on the physical world?
By what means can any entity behave in reference to any other entity that must by definition have no influence upon it?
I don't think existence is the problem, but I think existence is a necessary precursor to causal influence. What doesn't exist certainly can't have any physical impact on the world. So, the example of having a coherent discussion about something that doesn't exist demonstrates that the subject of discussion need not be causally responsible for discussion.
Are we really going to go down the "durr no real circles but their ratio is pi" road again?
Something must exist physically in some capacity for you to move your lips about it, even if it's not necessarily in the particular capacity you perceive it to be. The misperception is only in our personal inability to describe it.
I agree that all my behavior is explainable by purely physical mechanism. This actually is part of the point Chalmers tries to make. Everything we do seems to have a physical explanation, a unified physical theory could explain every behavior I ever have or will engage in, and it would do so without ever needing to make any reference experience. My eyes and brain can cooperate to avoid obstacles when walking or seek out food purely through physical causality, there is no need anywhere in the physical explanation to posit subjective experience. And yet I have absolutely convincing first hand evidence that I do in fact experience things.
The problem, as has been pointed out publicly to Chalmers like 600 times, is that this point is made by assumption.
From the fact that you CAN recursively talk about your consciousness, it is evident that an account of your behaviour would include an account of your subjective experience.
Start listing off what aspects of consciousness you think can't be explained by physical events, even the things you can't quite put into words, just count em. Taken as physical events, what might be a likely explanation the particular regularity of your behaviour? It might even involve concepts that don't have any existence on any individual microscopic level, like the concept of temperature to explain your experience of discomfort when it is too hot. But ultimately it will be derived from the behaviour of physical objects in space.
Now you've sort of already presented your idea of what experience is, you think it's an "abstraction", experience is a sort of name or grouping of certain physical facts.
Actually I meant that when you talk about our ability to refer to "things that don't exist" like James Bond and his cufflinks, you, in the way you're characterizing it, are just abstracting away the complex set of physical influences that help you create ideas like fictional characters and cufflinks etc and then claiming it's actually nonphysical. It's a subtle but important difference. There's nothing nonphysical about it, even if the physical influences are extremely messy and hard to disentangle.
There are complex physical I fluences that we, for the sake of convenience, of perhaps even by necessity due to our limited ability to process things to the level of conscious understanding (doesn't matter either way), abstract away.
The experience of pain, in the position I think you're representing, simply describes a subset of possible brain states that we group together and generalize and call "pain". I don't find this satisfactory though, for one experience is radically subjective. I'm literally incapable of feeling anyone's experience of pain but my own.
Imagine one robot saying to another robot "the unit identified as X89 is literally incapable of performing the computation of any other unit, only the computations of X89. Because even if you were to take all the information about the computation of another unit and dump it into X89, X89 can still only ever perform X89's computation of it."
This would be a massive "no shit" to a third observer and not prove or require some radical subjectivity but a totally non-radical kind of subjectivity, that semantically two different things cannot be the same because they are defined as such.
No other physical phenomenon, or abstracted group of physical phenomena, seems to have this quality. An every day object is what it is, it presents itself the same to everything. The Eiffel Tower is a little over a thousand feet tall, that holds for you and it holds for me. It doesn't even seem to have any relation to you or me or anybody. It's just a plain old fact. My experience is only meaningful to me however, there seem to be no mind independent facts about experience.
Not at all, it's just one more fact. You can "know about" the stress of thousands of tonnes of steel upon the base of the eiffel tower. It's a relatively simple calculation at the end of the day. But you can't know "what it's like" to supports thousands of tons of steel. The difference isn't surprising n
Although I generally believe there are other things having experiences in the world, I'm absolutely isolated from those experiences and no amount of physical knowledge about the world will ever give me experiential access to anything other than my own experience. This is kind of color scientist Mary, repackaged. That's pretty convincing to me, there really doesn't see to be anything physical to be said, at any level of abstraction, about experience (other than, perhaps, its physical causes).
Imagine we raise a robot called Robo-Mary from birth inside a monochrome room. She never receives a photon outside of a particular hue. Robo-Mary receives ALL the physical information about colours, light and perception, including all information about an identical Robo-Mary (let's call her Bobo) who is looking at a rainbow and receiving photons from coloured sources and processing them. Robo-Mary then makes her optical sensors output the same information to the rest of her system, as from the information provided her. Then she turns off this simulation and steps outside of the room to see a real rainbow.
We would not expect Robo Mary to receive any new information or be "surprised" at what she witnesses. By the declaration that she received all physical information about it in the first place, it is trivial. But of course she could only experience what Mary can experience, not what Bobo can experience, because she is Mary and not Bobo. But this is again trivial and nowhere do we even need to posit that Robo-Mary necessarily must be "conscious". She could be doing it in the dark, and so could Bobo. But we would see the same kind of "subjectivity problem" (the "no-shit" kind). It wouldn't indicate anything non-physical.
